Benjamin, please note that I never said force wasn't a good idea. If that was the case then instead of studying Aikido, I could just go and join a monastery, and be free of violence forever. Force is definately still on the table for me. The key thing I've learn from all my experiences is basically how to defuse dangerous situations, how to escape it, how to uphold myself to not look vulnerable, and how to protect myself.

My instinctive thought – based on how you've portrayed yourself in this thread, is to ask how sure you are that you haven't just learned to perceive threats where none exist. That you then think you've defused when nothing happens.

But as long as it works for you and you're comfortable with yourself. I suppose it doesn't really matter.

Quote:

Alic Xie wrote:

I have to disagree about your thoughts on bullying though. I do agree about the portion regarding not trying to "win" per say. That's definately true, we're only trying to keep ourselves safe. However, in a school life situation, you don't have the choice of not ever meeting that person again, and if you don't gain a decisive victory over the bully, he (or she) may not ever leave you alone. However, if you attempt to prevent further clashes by trying to cost them something, immature folks like bullies are more likely to come back and try to damage you worse. I've had people I know get jumped because they won a fight against their attackers earlier. Small-minded individuals do not mind ganging up on you to get a victory.

You can play this escalation game forever. If you come up with a solution to getting jumped, what happens if the other guy brings a knife to school and just stabs you? It's rare but it happens – I know someone who had it happen to them. As it turns out what happened was they knocked the other kid out with a fire-extinguisher.

As I said earlier, fighting is a gamble. Personally, I consider the risks that you're going to get jumped and badly beaten a few times until they realise that's not going to work to break you – or the smaller chance that they'll escalate into killing you – when compared against the near certainty that the abuse will continue otherwise, just part of the cost of not living on your knees.

Quote:

Alic Xie wrote:

This is why I think Aikido is a good way to deal with bullies. You win decisively and deceptively, but at the same time the opponent isn't badly hurt.

Kids being bullied don't need something that they're told might work in two years if they practice diligently enough, they need something they can use reliably the minute they walk out of their first lesson because the next day they're going to be back in school getting the crap kicked out of them again. Basics of boxing take a couple of hours to teach someone. They won't be brilliant but they'll have something they can use and any practice on top of that's just going to make them better at it.

Quote:

Alic Xie wrote:

I want to see what other people has experienced, and what they took away from their experiences. So if you got something at all, before or after Aikido, I would love to read about it. Maybe I can learn something from it too.

My first experience of any sort of violence was before I went to school. I was of the opinion that I didn't want a bath, my father was of the opinion I was having one anyway. He decided that the obvious solution would be to use force to get his way. I remember my sister used to get beaten for not wanting her hair cut too.

The next moment that springs to mind I was in the first year of primary school. I can't even remember what it was about but a teacher had backed me into a corner and tried to grab me – and I don't think I've ever much liked being touched, so I did the instinctive thing and bit her.

It was later explained to me that she wouldn't have hurt me, that there existed larger legal and ethical frameworks into which her behaviour was meant to fit. My parents never raised a hand to me again.

I didn't have much trouble with people for a fair number of years after that. There were a couple of fist fights but nothing of any interest. Generally all I had to do to get people to back off was give them a pissed off look. I think they realised that while some people were looking for a reason to fight, I was looking for a reason not to fight – my default solution was to fight as seriously as I could the minute a threat presented itself. The reputation I acquired as the resident psycho probably didn't hurt any either.

Let's see, dropped out of formal education at the end of primary school, skipped most of secondary school, attended a sixth form college to get my A Levels. That'd be about the next time I ran into someone who thought that being violent with me would profit them – I was sitting at the bus-stop and a kid, who I later learned was there to resit his GCSEs, decided it'd be fun to flick a cigarette at me. I told him to knock it off, he got up in my face and spouted the usual 'what are you going to do about it?' drivel – he was absurdly over-confident, ended up telling me to take my best shot. So I grabbed his collar and nutted him in the face.

A short time afterwards – a couple of months – I found a drunk gentleman bothering a couple of young girls at that same bus stop. I decided I could probably take him if it came down to it. Went over and told him that I thought he was bothering them. He said he thought he was bothering me. I said maybe he was. He looked me in the eye and backed down. The girls were quite glad as I recall.

I suspect the decision to stick their bus-stop where there's very little pedestrian traffic wasn't a bright idea on that part of whoever planned it. They seem to have a lot of trouble there.

Went off to university, joined the special constabulary, (volunteer police in the UK). Got into a scuffle from time to time that way but nothing particularly hair-raising. I took up aikido at around that time because I wanted something to handle people who weren't any particular threat to me but that I, nonetheless, needed to restrain. Obviously I could just have restrained them by knocking the daylights out of them, but you can't exactly make a habit of that – and let's face it most of them are drunk or stupid anyway, it's sad that their lives have placed them there, but it's not really their fault.

At this point I'd pretty much lost count of the number of situations I'd been in. I always seemed to be the guy that ended up having to take someone down to the ground just because everyone else was waiting for me to do it – which was a bit annoying.

Got out of university without graduating – I just couldn't take the boredom of memorising lists of studies and I've never been one for forming really close friendships, so there was nothing and no-one keeping me there. Joined the military, and that's more or less where I've been since. I like the work, it pays well, and if I didn't do it properly someone else would just do it poorly.

Don't know what I'm going to do once we get out of Afghanistan though. On the one hand, there's always another war at some point. On the other, I'm not sure I could take too much sitting around on base with my thumb up my arse. Probably join the police or a private security company. I've a friend who works for G4S, they seem to offer fairly good opportunities. Might even go back to uni and finish off my degree – I made sure I could when I left.